It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a comet full of beers! Wait….What!?
Yeah, you read that correctly. Comet Lovejoy is raining beers upon us all and we haven’t thanked it once.
NASA has discovered that Comet Lovejoy is releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space. According to CompleteFaq, this is the first time that ethyl alcohol, the same that are in alcoholic beverages, has been discovered in a comet.
More important than the obvious fact that we have discovered space beers which sounds absolutely delicious, is that this gives scientists more of a reason to believe that this occurrence is not as rare as we might believe and may be an answer for how life on our own planet began.
The fact that this comet contains ethyl alcohol as well as glycolaldehyde (a simple sugar) and 21 other organic molecules.
If a comet with this components struck our planet in its early stages, it would provide the necessary components of early stages of life.
Nicholas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France said, “we found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity.”
Biver is the lead author on the paper of the discovery which was released on October 23rd in Science Advances.
Comets often drift along the outer rim of the universe where sunlight fails to reach. This gives scientists a chance to take samples from matter which remains unaltered since the creation of the universe.
“The next step is to see if the organic material being found in comets came from the primordial cloud that formed the solar system or if it was created later on, inside the protoplanetary disk that surrounded the young sun,” said Dominique Bockelée-Morvan from Paris Observatory, a co-author of the paper.
While scientists still study this finding for more answers about our existence one thing is certain; that comet definitely knows how to party.
